him and Long Qingping, the rain had been unending, letting up briefly, only to start up again harder than ever.
The water nearly reached his knees. Wrapped in a black raincoat, the security section chief was squatting on his chair. Two days and nights of questioning had produced no results. The man was a chain-smoker; the water around him was peppered with water-soaked cigarette butts and the air was suffocating with acrid smoke. Rubbing his bloodshot eyes, the section chief yawned from exhaustion, as did the official recorder. Then he picked up a notebook from the wet desktop and stared at the smudged writing. Reaching out and grabbing Jintong by the ear, he barked, “Did you rape her first and then kill her?” Jintong stood there weeping, but with no more tears to shed. “I didn’t kill her,” he repeated, “and I didn’t rape her…”
“You don’t have to tell me,” the section chief said, running out of patience. “But a medical expert from the county will be here soon, and he’s bringing attack dogs with him. Tell me now, and that will count as a voluntary confession.”
“I didn’t kill her,” he said one more time, sleepily, “and I didn’t rape her.”
The section chief took out a pack of cigarettes, crushed it, and tossed it into the water. As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he said to the recorder, “Go to the farm headquarters building, Sun, and place a call to the County Security Bureau. Tell them to get over here as soon as possible.” He sniffed the air. “The body’s starting to stink, and if they don’t come soon, our investigation will be ruined.”
“Boss,” the man said, “are you crazy? I tried calling the day before yesterday and couldn’t get through. The rain has washed away telephone poles.”
“Shit!” the section chief cursed as he jumped down off of his chair, put on his rain cap, and waded over to the door, where he stuck out his head to look around. A roaring curtain of water drenched his shiny back as he ran over to the site of Jintong and Commander Long’s illicit liaison. Out in the yard, clean and dirty water merged, with dead chickens floating on the surface. The few surviving hens were perched atop the wall – heads tucked down, clucking piteously. Jintong had a splitting headache and his teeth were chattering. His mind was a blank, except for the movements of Commander Long’s nakedness. After impulsively entering her dying body, he had experienced terrible remorse, but now all he felt toward her was loathing and disgust. He struggled to break free of her likeness, but, as with Natasha years before, it stuck doggedly in his mind. The difference was that Natasha was a beautiful young image, while Commander Long was a repulsive, demonic one. At the moment he was dragged out to be interrogated, he made up his mind not to reveal the ugly details of what had happened. I didn’t rape her, and I didn’t kill her. She tried to force herself on me, and when I resisted, she killed herself. That’s all he would reveal under the pressures of the relentless questioning.
The security chief returned and shook the water off of his neck. “Damn!” he exclaimed. “She’s all bloated. Like a debristled hog. Disgusting.” He pinched his throat.
Off in the distance, the cafeteria’s red-brick chimney came crashing to the ground, still belching black smoke, and took the building itself – roof, windows, Venetian blinds, and all – with it, sending gray water towering into the air with a roar.
“The building’s down,” the security chief exclaimed. “Now what? Forget the fucking interrogation – now we won’t even be able to eat!”
The collapse of the cafeteria opened up an unobstructed view of the fields. It also created the terrifying sight of an ocean of water, all the way to the horizon. The dikes of the Flood Dragon River poked through the surface here and there, but the water within them rose above the level beyond. The rain fell unevenly to earth, as if dumped by a gigantic watering can moving rapidly across the sky. Directly below the watering can the downpour set up a roar, with torrents of water creating a mist over the land; everywhere else, sunlight lit up the gentle flow of floodwaters. Situated in the lowest spot of the Northeast Gaomi marshy lowland, the Flood Dragon River Farm was irrigated by water from three separate counties. Soon after the cafeteria collapsed, every farm structure, from those with rammed-earth walls to tile-roofed buildings, crumbled into the rushing water, except for the grain storage building, which had been planned and constructed by a rightist named Liang Badong. A few sections of the chicken coop, built with bricks from the graveyard, managed to remain upright, but the water had already reached the windows. Benches and stools floated on the water, which was up to Jintong’s navel as he too began to float in his chair.
Cries of distress sounded everywhere, as people struggled against the flood. “Head for the river dikes!” someone shouted.
The security section recorder kicked out the window and fled, followed by the curses of the section chief. He turned to Jintong. “Follow me,” he said.
So Jintong followed the squat section chief out into the yard, where the man had to move his arms back and forth in the water to keep standing. Jintong looked behind him and spotted a clutch of chickens perched on the roof, alongside the wicked fox. Long Qingping’s corpse floated out of the room and followed him. When he sped up, so did the corpse, and when he made a turn, the corpse followed suit. Long Qingping’s corpse nearly made him soil himself out of fright. Finally, her tangle of hair was caught in the wire fence around the war relics, and Jintong was free of her. The artillery barrels poked out of the muddy water; of the tanks, only the turrets and guns showed above the surface, like enormous turtles sticking their necks out of the water. When the two men drew up to the tractor unit, the chicken farm collapsed.
In the tractor unit garage, people had crowded onto a pair of red Russian combines, and more were trying to climb aboard; by doing so, they sent others sliding down into the water.
A surge of water washed away the security section chief, gaining for Jintong his freedom. He and several rightists headed, hand in hand, toward the Flood Dragon River under the leadership of the high-jumper Wang Meizan, with the civil engineer Liang Badong bringing up the rear. Huo Lina, Ji Qiongzhi, Qiao Qisha, and others he didn’t know walked between the two men, joined by Jintong, who half walked and half swam into their midst. Qiao Qisha reached out to him. The women’s wet blouses stuck to their bodies, almost as if they were naked. By force of habit, however disgusting, he cast fleeting glances at the chests of Huo Lina, Ji Qiongzhi, and Qiao Qisha. They carried Jintong back to the dreamland of his youth, and drove Long Qingping’s image out of his head. He felt himself turning into a butterfly crawling out of Long’s blackened corpse to dry his wings in the sun and flit among a garden of breasts that emitted a strange redolence.
Jintong found himself wishing he could trudge through this water forever, but the Flood Dragon River dike dashed his hopes. Farm workers huddled atop the dike were hugging their shoulders as the floodwaters flowed slowly down the trough and sent a soft mist into the air. There were no swallows, there were no gulls. Off to the southwest, Dalan was shrouded in the whiteness of rain; everywhere they looked they saw the chaos of water.
When the red-tiled grain storage shed finally fell, the Flood Dragon River Farm became nothing but a gigantic lake. Sounds of weeping rose from the dike – leftists were crying, and so were rightists. Director Li Du, a man they seldom saw, was shaking his gray head – Lu Liren’s head, that is – and shouting shrilly, “Don’t cry, comrades. Be strong. As long as we remain united, we can overcome any difficulty…” All of a sudden, he clutched his chest and began to crumple. The head of the management section tried to catch him, but he fell onto the muddy ground in a heap. “Is there a doctor here? Anyone with medical knowledge, come, quickly!” the man bellowed.
Qiao Qisha and a male rightist ran up. They checked the victim’s pulse and raised his lids to look at his eyes. Then they pinched the trough under his nose and the spot between his thumb and index finger, but that did no good. “He’s gone,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Heart attack.”
Ma Ruilian opened her mouth and released wails from Shangguan Pandi’s throat.
As night fell, the people huddled to stay warm. An airplane with flashing green lights appeared in the sky, rekindling hope below. But it flew past, like a comet, and never returned. At some time in the middle of the night, the rain stopped, and hordes of frogs croaked an earsplitting chorus. A few stars twinkled tentatively in the sky, looking as if they were about to fall to earth. During a brief respite from the croaking frogs, the wind whistled through tree branches floating past us. Out of nowhere, someone dove into the water and immediately turned belly-up, like a large fish. No one screamed for help; no one even seemed to notice. Before long, someone else jumped in, and this time, the reaction on the dike was, if anything, even more callous.
Starlight shone down on Qiao Qisha and Huo Lina as they walked up to Jintong. “I want to tell you about my background in a roundabout fashion,” Qiao Qisha said. She then turned to Huo Lina and spoke to her in Russian for several minutes. Huo Lina matter-of-factly interpreted for her. “When I was four, I was sold to a White Russian woman. No one could tell me why this woman wanted to buy a Chinese girl.” Qiao Qisha continued in Russian, with Huo Lina interpreting. “One day the Russian woman died of alcohol poisoning and I was left to roam the streets, until I was taken in by a railroad station manager. He and his family treated me like their own daughter. Since they
